The Christian Soulmate Fallacy--Response to Timothy Keller
Brad responds to a Twitter thread by Timothy Keller, pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Keller argues for sex in a lifelong covenant marked by deep permanent union. He calls this biblical. Brad points out that the only biblical soulmate story we have of this kind is between God and Israel, which is a problematic example since God is both Israel's Husband AND maker. How do you have consent and symmetry if your spouse is your creator? He then shows that the soulmate myth Keller is advancing comes from Plato, not the Bible. And this non-biblical source of biblical sexual ethics is problematic for Keller because it includes same-sex soulmates and is articulated by a comic poet. In other words, it's meant to be a joke. Shoutout to Cindy Wang Brandt in this episode!
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Hello y'all.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty in religion at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
Today, I wanted to respond to Timothy Keller, who is a pastor and commentator, somebody that many of you have seen on Twitter recently, seemingly just one of the many evangelical men who's felt the need to kind of defend What I would call purity culture, but what they would call a covenant of lifelong marriage and a strict biblical sexual ethos in the wake of what happened in Atlanta.
In the wake of Atlanta, there was a lot of eyeballs and a lot of interest on Purity culture because the perpetrator of that massacre was somebody who not only was raised in an evangelical space and seemingly was preoccupied with lust, but whose actions seem to stem directly from kind of cultivation and formation in purity culture.
So there's been a lot of blowback.
There's been a lot of interest in this.
New York Times and Washington Post and other places have been publishing articles and op-eds etc.
Well, Timothy Keller is a pastor in New York City, is very prominent, has half a million Twitter followers and so on, but has sort of been on this train of defending what he calls a biblical approach to marriage.
So he tweeted last week that sex outside of a lifelong marriage covenant is dehumanizing.
There was a lot of blowback.
There was a ratio situation on Twitter.
And so he has another thread that came out At the end of last week and I wanted to respond to that today because I think there's a lot here that just needs to be fleshed out.
So he says here on April 2nd.
Many of the hostile responses assume a highly Western white individualistic therapeutic understanding of the self in which sexual expression is a key part of authenticity.
It is the reason one finds sexual boundaries oppressive.
This therapeutic view of identity has been imposed on you by your culture.
It turns sex into a commodity.
It is not good for you or for society.
To question it, read Reef, Lash, and Taylor's Sources of the Self.
Christians believe we are purposed to live in certain ways by God, and to violate God's design is to violate our own natures.
Secular culture says we determine our own purposes, but that fails.
See MacIntyre's After Virtue.
We believe sex was not created just for pleasure, but for mutual self-giving toward a deep, permanent union that creates a character and a new human life.
In sex, outside of marriage, we maintain our independence and fail to give our whole selves to the other person.
All right, I'll read more of the thread in a minute, but I want to just sort of go back to the beginning and start at the first one.
So the first thread, I'm sorry, the first tweet in the thread says, many of the hostile responses assume a highly Western white individualistic therapeutic understanding of the self.
And he then goes on to relate sexual expression to authenticity.
In the second tweet in the thread, we learn that he is referencing Philip Reif and Lash and Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self.
All right, so let me talk about that.
Let's talk about Philip Reif, shall we?
Reif wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and I've taught this book in the past, and it came out in the 60s.
And there's no sort of coincidence that Keller is referencing a book that came out in the 60s.
Because Reef's book was really sort of a book that was arguing that the sexual revolution and all the other sort of changes to society in the 60s were undoing the fabric and the foundations of Western civilization and that the triumph of a therapeutic approach to the self was really going to be our undoing.
For Reif, the therapeutic self is a self that has no loyalty to anyone or any structure or belief system except for itself.
It is a pure, unbridled self.
It is essentially Freud's id.
The book that preceded Reif's Triumph of the Therapeutic was a book that Reif wrote on Freud.
The authentic self is, in many ways, this id that is unleashed.
It is able to explore every avenue of self-fulfillment.
And while it may be limited by society's rules and laws and things like that, it has no loyalty to any belief system or structure.
It is not going to discipline itself.
It is not going to keep itself in check.
So this, right, with Reif, and then I think we see with Keller, is a reference to the idea that when society falls away from monotheistic belief in God, Judeo-Christian values, whatever terms these guys use, it falls into the chaos of atheism, right?
That secular society is nothing but chaos and destruction and conflict, right?
If you're an ex-evangelical, you know that there's been someone in your life when you left the church that said to you, Oh, this is why you're going through so much conflict and pain.
It's because you've left the church.
You've left God, right?
There's this idea that outside of the boundaries of, you know, belief in the one true God and the community that follows Him, That life is nothing but chaos, right?
It's this logic, okay?
And hang with me here.
It's a logic of either the one and the many.
And the one provides a foundation.
It's a foundation that orients all of life, okay?
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